


The Fiercest Calm

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Aftermath of a Case, Diners, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Partnership, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 20:15:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4933795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a slightly oversentimental MSR with hurt-comfort elements that ultimately tries for optimism, lovemaking, and a bunch of crowd-pleasing elements. Scully and Mulder deal with the aftermath of a case, diners are involved, sex is had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fiercest Calm

I don’t think I’ll ever get comfortable with any case where young children die. Ever. The case we’ve just wrapped up is proof of that. There were six-year-old twin boys, pierced in the back of the neck and left in the family bathroom to bleed to death. The boys had also been in a medical test program for asthma. Mulder had to investigate. I don’t think it was a question of wanting. Of course, I had to do a second autopsy on the boys, looking for evidence. It was absolutely gruesome, as were the interrogations with the parents, who were heartbroken and unaware that we were looking for something far beyond simple murder. If murder is ever simple.

As it turns out, the boys were killed by their unstable fifteen-year-old babysitter, who kept screaming at the top of her cheerleading lungs that God told her to do it as the police drug her away. The chief detective, a nice guy in his mid-forties with kids of his own growled as the girl was driven away, “Fuck, how come God never tells people to follow the rules, or donate money to charity, huh?”

It was too ghoulish to stand there anymore. I headed back towards to the car, sick to my stomach. Mulder just stood there, staring after the police car, as it became a blur of light in the early evening. After waiting for him a few minutes, I realized he wasn’t going to move. I got in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition. Mulder kept staring. I drove up next to him.

“Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want to go back to the motel?”

He shook himself, in a blur of realization and horror. “Sure,” he said, turning blank eyes towards me. Then he shuffled around the car, opening and slamming the passenger’s door. Very calmly, very blankly, he pulled the seatbelt on. “That was terrible.”

“Yeah,” I replied quietly, driving out of the parking lot. “You’d think we’d get used to it after so long.”

He snorted softly. “Call me a sentimentalist, Scully, but the day we get used to it, I hope lightning strikes us dead.”

I nodded my agreement silently as he fiddled with the radio knobs. The area we drove through was nice: family homes that all looked the same, with a minivan in the driveway, and a lawn that was in good condition, and a sign swinging over the door letting us know who owned that particular box of concrete. It was a beautiful day in late September, and I tried desperately to reconnect with the tranquility of the area. Life wasn’t bad for these people, and we’d helped keep their world safer, we really and truly had done good today. But all I could feel as we kept driving was an empty, burning hole, a shuddering sort of acknowledgement in my body. The horror was just too close.

At a stop sign, he tried to say something. “It looks so nice–” he began to say.

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “When do we get out of here?”

At the motel, we didn’t speak as we walked out of the car and into our own separate rooms. I packed my suitcase with the efficiency of an automaton. Then I took a short, blazing hot shower– trying to get some of the chill out of my bones– and then I laid down with a book, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I tried to read. But I couldn’t focus on a single word, so after about half an hour trying, I put the book down, kicked off my clothes, and curled under the covers in my pajamas, comforter pulled tight against my chin. I wanted to sleep, sleep until I woke up safe again, not lost in some blurry suburbia where children died horribly and the silence was trying to smother me in not-thinking-about-it.

It was so lonely and silent I almost started to cry. The walls were too close to me, and the darkness that lurked in that parking lot was wrapping around my body too intimately. I had to get up, get out, feel something other than empty.

That’s how I eventually ended up at a Denny’s on Madison and Main, in my only pair of jeans and my FBI Academy t-shirt. The waitress, a true American Gothic, brought me a third vanilla coke, as I tried to resolve the lights glittering from the window into houses and families and warmth. I was shivering with cold, a deep and profound cold.

“This seat taken?”

Mulder. Of course it was Mulder, and he looked as miserable as I was.

“I’ve actually been saving it for my lover,” I said with an attempt at flirtatiousness. He sat down on the vinyl seat and regarded me seriously.

“Really? Who’s that?”

“Nobody in particular. Tall, dark, and handsome. In law enforcement.”

“Do I know him?”

“Maybe.”

“I bet he likes Denny’s for the pie.”

“And the vanilla coke,” I replied, raising my glass and swirling it slightly.

“Oh. I was actually **sure** you were here for the mineral water and the salad bar.”

The waitress returned with a large hot-fudge sundae, which she plunked  
down in front of me. Mulder lifted his eyebrows.

“What can I say, Mulder?” I asked, taking a spoon to the ooey confectionary. “It’s comfort food.”

“I see,” he said. “Can I get a double western cheeseburger then? No bacon? And a double order of french fries? With a vanilla milkshake?”

The waitress shrugged, took his order, and sailed away. “What about the pie?” I asked.

“I wait for dessert,” he replied solemnly. I nodded and took a bite of sundae. “So, is it any good?”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I replied, swallowing. “I’m sorry I ran off with the car.”

“Not a problem. Any reason why?”

“I just needed to get out and move around. That case was really a bit much,” I confessed.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “There’s no reason why that one more than any other case, but it just made me sick to my stomach.”

“I understand,” I murmured, looking out the window again. “I wish–”

“Let me guess. You wish for your lover?”

“Sure.”

“Me, too,” Mulder said. “She’s in law enforcement, too. Hurrah for coincidence, don’t you think? I’m madly in love with her. One of these days, I’m going to blow her mind and propose.”

“You? Get married?” I asked, licking my spoon. “Are you out of your mind?”

“You have no idea, Scully. I was made for this woman. She’s the first thing I think of in the morning, and the last thing I think of at night.”

I smile. The waitress places his milkshake on the table and leaves. “My lover is like that. I think I could take on the whole world with his help.”

“That’s a sweet sentiment.”

“You, too, Mulder.”

“Kind of cloying, of course. But I can tell you mean it. Your lover’s a lucky bastard.”

“Right back at you, Mulder.”

We smiled at each other, something that was real and affectionate. The darkness had receded somewhat, and I didn’t feel quite so cold.

Mulder looked away, towards the kitchen. “Did our waitress have to raise my hamburger from infancy?”

* * *

 

We drove back to the motel in a comfortable, dreamy quiet, as compared to the painful silence from before. The radio was playing some ungodly teen dreck until I flipped it off in frustration and stared out the window again. This time, I could almost see the family inside the identical houses, safe, and that was extremely comforting.

This time in the parking lot, we didn’t try to speak at first. But we walked close to each other and at the door of my room, I grabbed his hand. Actually, grabbed is too strong of a word. I took it in mine and squeezed slowly.

“Thank you,” I said. “I enjoyed having dinner with you.”

“For you? It’s a pleasure,” he replied.

He leaned down, and I got on tiptoe. Then he kissed me and I kissed him. It was a slow, gentle kiss; a kiss about compassion, about warm pumpkin pie and steaming hot mashed potatoes with gravy. It was about fires on cold nights, afghans pulled around your shoulders. It was a kiss that drove nightmares away.

“Do you think your lover’s going to mind?” he asked, pulling away from me.

“Is yours?”

We both shook our heads, and then Mulder did the soap-opera-romance hero thing and picked me up, while I reciprocated in the blatantly cheesy romance department and threw my arms around his neck and covered his cheek and jaw with buckshot kisses.

The bedsprings squeaked indignantly as two grown adults fell against them in the first time in I don’t know how long. I let go of him, and did the swoon against the bed bit. He looked down at me and I got butterflies in my stomach. Wow. I loved him. And he loved me. Wow. It was amazing, and I’d known it forever. Amazing.

“I always forget that you’re this beautiful,” he said. I smiled. It was starting to hurt my face because it had been a long time since I’d had reason to smile so much.

“And I always forget you’re ten feet taller than I am,” I replied, feeling dwarfed underneath him. “Could you do me a favor, Mulder?”

“Sure.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

He obliged, of course– Mulder loves to put that mouth of his to use–but not before muttering, “I knew you were going to say that.”

And then we stopped talking. Words were very unnecessary as his tongue massaged mine, and I arched up under his body, my hands easing up under his delectable grey t-shirt, pushing the material up. He broke the kiss only when the shirt reached his shoulders, and then only long enough to get rid of both of our t-shirts. Like I said, Mulder is orally fixated. But after my shirt was off, he started kissing down my neck, then up against to nibble on my earlobe.

I whimpered, and my knee slide between his thighs, much closer to the groin than I expected. He kept biting at my earlobe as my body started shivering under his. I wanted him, wanted him with everything in me, and as one of my hands scratched across his shoulders lightly, the other slid down to the waistband of his jeans, and tugged.

His eyes caught mine, and I smiled and moaned my approval. Yes, I meant it. I wanted this, because I loved him and it was the right thing, finally. And for once, we were in complete agreement.

Now it was his knee nudging my thighs apart, further, fitting us together like a jigsaw puzzle, pushing and moving against each other, building friction and frisson and– oh, yes. One of his hands was around my breast, squeezing in almost childish fascination. The other was stroking my side, as his mouth mapped out the hollow at my collarbone.

I felt him hovering over me, and I just couldn’t think of anything else, not the morning, or the darkness, or anything beyond that bed and that man. I wrapped my legs around his waist and squeezed, rubbing against him more insistently. He responded by pulling away– I whimpered my disapproval– and attack my 501’s with his fingers, destroying my button fly, and tugging them and my underwear away with a passionate disregard. I shuddered, feeling the moist heat of his mouth right underneath my breasts as I slid down, rolling us over.

My hand stroked the interior of his thigh, feeling the warmth beneath the rough denim. He thrust up against me, reminding me that those jeans were fairly uncomfortable and he’d rather be rid of them. I think I smiled, and I might have even laughed, kissing my way down his chest. And then I yanked those pants off Mulder with the speed of a cartoon mouse. He groaned, and I pulled myself atop him, warm, sweltering with a fever. And as for what happens next– I can never remember the right romance novel euphemism. He possessed me, or entered me, or vice versa. He was in me deep, and I rocked back and forth, trying to get my bearings, trying not to cry with happiness.

We moved slowly, picking up a rhythm as we went along. That’s our MO in everything, so why not in lovemaking? Now that it had actually happened, my slick body sliding up and down his cock, it wasn’t a mad dash to get it over and done with in a passionate, mindless mess. I pushed against him slowly, bending down to kiss him once or twice. He, in turn, felt every square inch of my skin that he could reach, as we slowly moved faster and harder. The sweet, hot feeling started racing up my spine, building to a temporary tension point as I sucked in a deep breath and starting slamming against him. My breath caught in my throat and stopped there as I felt each thrust lodge a little higher in my spine until finally, with one last thrust, I gasped in, breath no longer stuck, coming hard against him.

It didn’t take him much longer, and after all of that, I looked down at him and realized God, I did love him, and that I was glad that he was here.

And then I didn’t think of much of anything at all, just crawled next to him and listened to him breathe until the sound hypnotized me to sleep.

* * *

In the morning, when I woke up, he wasn’t there. I didn’t know whether to cry, be really angry, or really relieved. But, clutching the sheets around me, I just felt cold, rather shocked he wasn’t there for me to wake up with.

“We’re going to be late for our flight,” I heard him call from the bathroom. “I guess you forgot to set your travel alarm, and you looked so peaceful asleep I just decided to let you sleep.”

“So I get to have morning breath and kill the stewardess this time?” I asked.

“Not if you hurry.”

I swung out of bed, and muttered a little under-the-breath curse. “You trashed my one pair of jeans.”

“It was for a good cause. Borrow my sweatshirt and they’ll never notice,” he called. I made a face– Mulder definitely had a lot to learn about morning hygiene– but I pulled on the jeans. And I realized that I had slept extremely well, without nightmares or the anxiety that prevents me from really getting to sleep nights. I felt rested.

“I notice,” I replied. “But if we’re that late, fine. You owe me a new pair of jeans, though.”

“Of course,” Mulder replied, poking his head out. “So what’s your lover’s policy on sharing?”

“I think he’d have to ask your lover first, jean-destroyer,” I replied. “But I’m fairly sure it’s liberal.”

He laughed, one of those full-bodied laughs I’m not used to hearing from Mulder. “Good, because otherwise I’d have had to kick his ass, and you wouldn’t have liked that.”

I let him keep talking as I fell into my own reverie. I realized that’s why, after all the bullshit, I loved Mulder. He had more than his share of faults, but I was sitting there, with a busted pair of jeans, and it didn’t really matter, because I was comfortable, safe even, in the fierce calm that we created for each other.

“I don’t know, Mulder,” I said, rooting under my bed for my shoes. “Are you sure you could kick his ass?”

He laughed, and in our fractured perfection, we continued getting ready to catch our plane.


End file.
